


A Garden Planted

by ziparumpazoo



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, F/M, Season/Series 4.5, faith - Freeform, post-Maelstrom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-10
Updated: 2012-08-10
Packaged: 2017-11-11 20:41:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziparumpazoo/pseuds/ziparumpazoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only thing that really scares Kara is the idea of being forgotten. Or, Kara contemplates her mortality, and Lee worries about getting things right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Garden Planted

**Author's Note:**

> There are some fantastic authors in this fandom who've written some exceptional stories examining themes like choice and a woman's right to choose, or the duty preserve and propagate humanity. This is not one of those stories. It's not exactly fluffy babyfic, either. When Hotdog snarked _"You've frakked half the fleet. What do you have to show for it?"_ , Kara's reaction was, well, interesting.

_"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there."  
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451_

 

_The Black…_

Cottle shuffles the sheaf of papers in her medical file. "So you thought right. Congratulations Captain." He's blunt, but Kara expected nothing less. There were few constants left in the universe, but the doc was one of them. It's sort of a comfort after all these years; no matter how torn up and broken somebody is, Doc Cottle treats them like they just hauled him out of bed for a sliver.

"I'm going to assume that this wasn't planned," he says as she pulls the cotton ball from the crook of her elbow. He's leaning against the cubicle divider with a cigarette balanced between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand like a pen, waiting for her to finish dressing so he can light it and move on to the next patient.

"Uh, not exactly." She stands to button her uniform jacket.

"Kind of surprising, actually." Cottle gestures in her general direction with the cigarette.

"Why? Because it's me?" Frankly, she's tired of the questions, tired of the suspicion. 

Cottle grunts. "Because you're short an ovary and you pilots have probably been exposed to enough radiation over the last couple years to sterilize half the fleet. Aren't exactly the best odds if you _were_ trying to conceive."

"Yeah, well," she fastens the top button of her jacket and pulls on the collar where it's chafing the back of her neck. "Beating the odds – isn't that what I'm famous for?" It's a feint though; she hasn't felt like the infamous Starbuck for a while now. Like her uniform, there are some things that still don't fit quite right anymore.

He lights the cigarette and squints at her through the curl of smoke. For a second it feels like he's looking right through her, trying to find that detail or some tell to prove she's not still the smartass pilot he's put back together more than a few times before. Whatever he's looking for, he doesn't find it. He exhales out the side of his mouth, "Make an appointment with Ishay for next week and we'll do a full workup." He pushes the curtain open. "Oh, and the President wants to see you before you leave."

It's a relief, really, Kara thinks once she leaves sickbay, that the only thing _wrong_ with her is the one thing that makes her so fundamentally, biologically human. Irrefutable proof that she is who she says she is, and not a Cylon, not a fabrication, not a figment of their collective imaginations. For that reason alone, she's not ready to entertain the thought of terminating it. She's going to need to figure out a way to work around it until she decides what she's going to do though because they're getting so short on pilots.

Kara's mentally sorting through flight schedules when she passes the Admiral heading in the opposite direction. She pulls up short and calls after him, asks if he can spare a minute. There are some things better not put off, and some news safer not delivered in the privacy of the Admiral's quarters; she's got an uncomfortable history of learning both the hard way, and if that makes her a coward about this, so what?

He follows her when she steps out of the traffic flow and into a quieter cross-corridor, waits patiently while she blurts out the words and stumbles through how she'll re-arrange CAPs and accelerate pilot training for ECO's, and finally interrupts her with a firm "Starbuck." 

"We'll figure something out," he says and squeezes her shoulder. She's not sure what she sees in his expression; it's not anger and it's not disappointment, and it's definitely not the pride it might have been before the war and before Zak died, so she takes him at his word and nods. The Admiral holds up the book he's carrying. "If you'll excuse me, I've got an appointment to keep."

She steps to the side. "Of course, sir." His hand is heavy on her arm for a moment more as he walks past her. It's as much a blessing as he's able to spare right now.

::

Lee's so busy looking for Kara that he almost walks right by her. She's half hidden in the shadow of one of _Galactica's_ great ribs where it punctures the hanger deck catwalk, elbows propped on the guard-rail, intently watching yet another round of launch preparations going on below. If the pins on her collar hadn't caught the light as she'd shifted slightly while she worried her thumbnail with her teeth, he would have missed her altogether.

He stops for a moment, still a few paces off, and just watches; this stillness in her strikes him as odd and completely out of place. Kara's always been one of those people who thrive on being in the spotlight. She's usually the loudest voice in the room; a dervish of constant motion, an over-excited molecule burning with kinetic energy. 

To Lee, she's always been the brightest star in his sky.

But not since the _Demetrius_ returned. Not since her crew's mutiny and the deal with the Cylons she'd set in motion. It's almost like she's been walking with her head down, slipping through the halls and trying not to make a ripple since she got back. That alone is enough to stir up that feeling again, that prickle along the back of his neck that hints at something not quite right with her.

"Hey," he says, loud enough to get her attention over the general commotion on the floor below, but not so loud that anybody on the deck would hear him and look up. "Got word you were looking for me."

She turns slightly and there's a ghost of a smile before she pats the railing beside her. "Hey yourself."

He leans over the railing and makes a show of checking out the hanger. "Nice view," he says, and it is, if a bird's eye of the hanger deck floor and twenty-odd Vipers and their pilots forming up for launch prep is your idea of nice scenery.

"Not bad, huh? Every CAG needs an eye-in-the-sky." She leans over the rail farther than he'd consider safe for a second to watch the first Raptor being towed into position. "The Old Man used to come hang out here sometimes. Keeps 'em all on their toes." She tucks a wisp of hair that won't stay pulled back behind her ear, and just for a second, Lee tries not to remember how it had felt like silk between his fingers. 

"Wish I would have thought of that," he says and prides himself on how casual he sounds. "Think of all the crap you never would've gotten away with."

She answers with a snort and the first wide, genuine smile he's seen since before she left him the first time. "You still don't know half as much as you think you do." And gods, he has missed that smile. 

"So tell me," he asks playfully, "What secrets does the great Starbuck still keep?" It's meant to be a joke, but he regrets it the moment her smile slips and she turns back to the parade below. She curls her fingers around the railing and her knuckles turn white under pressure. Lee doesn't think about it, just puts his hand over hers and squeezes until he feels her relax enough that he can slip his fingers between hers for a second. 

"Kara… " They've never been good with words, the two of them. But no, that's not right either, Lee thinks. They've always been _exceptionally_ good with words, knowing which ones would cut the deepest. Just as they've always been quick with their fists and slower with their blunt apologies. He's not going to let them go there this round because he misses her and he doesn't want to spend these few precious minutes before he has to meet his shuttle fighting her for once. "Listen, I didn't mean- "

Kara shakes her head. "Lee, don't worry about it. Some things should never change." 

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other and back again before she looks up at him. For a moment she seems so fragile, so lost that he could swear he's back in his office months ago, that night before they'd lost her. He doesn't even have to close his eyes to remember how she'd clutched at him like she was drowning as he'd kissed her. How she'd hooked her ankle behind his knee as skin slid against skin, like she'd been afraid he was going to slip and let her go. 

In the end, he had.

Because the next day when he'd sat with her on the flight deck and she asked how things were with him and Dee, he'd been honest and told her they were better than they'd ever been. But as he'd paused, trying to qualify his words, she'd looked at him with so much sadness that it had felt like he'd been saying goodbye. Before he'd had a chance to explain, she'd been gone in a shower of sparks and shrapnel and he couldn't help feeling like when she'd needed him most, he'd pushed her away.

Now she's back and all he wants to do is hold on to her as securely as he can, for as long as she'll let him. He tightens his hand over hers. Kara seems to draw strength from it and pulls herself up. Squares her shoulders like she's just come to an unpleasant decision.

"Lee…" The way she hesitates over his name, he knows that whatever she's going to say next is going to knock his feet out from under him all over again. "I'm pregnant. I just thought you should know that."

Lee freezes. It's probably the last thing he'd expected. He just stands there, staring at her and waiting for her to deliver the punch line, maybe laugh at him, tell him she's joking. Tell him what a sucker for her he still is.

Except she doesn't. Her brow furrows and her mouth quivers until she bites down on her bottom lip hard enough to leave red marks. Under his fingers, the muscles of her hand stiffen and contract. If he doesn't say something soon, she's going to pull away.

"I could transfer back here," is the first thing that falls out of his mouth.

Kara squints at him then shakes her head. "Lee, don't be stupid. This," she nods at the suit and tie but he knows she means the whole politics thing. "You're good at this. You need this."

Now it's his turn to snort. "How would you know?" When she hadn't been in a cell, she'd been off ship for nearly two months, and they both knew rumors rarely held much truth.

"Because it pisses the Old Man off." And there's that smile again, flickering, but still there. 

He doesn't have an answer for that. Turning in his wings is still a point of contention with his father, even after all these months. He blinks. "Wait…how come Cottle didn't put this in the report?" If the Admiral had been privy to the news, the situation with the President might have played out differently. Or maybe not. Roslin has been pretty quick to lock Sharon up too.

"Report? What report?" Kara's watching him with a crease in her brow that softens as she catches on. "I just saw him about it a couple hours ago."

"No, I mean the report the Admiral ordered when you came back." _From the dead_ , he doesn't have to say. 

"I was only gone for a few hours then Lee," she reminds him quietly, as if it explains everything. He realizes that they might be standing side-by-side, but he still hasn't caught up to her yet. He's doubtful he ever will. 

It's not easy to forget they had a service for her, after all. They'd grieved.

"Oh," he manages and clutches at the railing. "Right." He can hear laughing and shouting from far below, but it has nothing to do with them. "So what now?"

She takes a deep breath and pushes off from the railing. "Now you have a Quorum to meet with, and I have to find the President a Raptor so she can go visit a hybrid." Back to business as usual.

"You know that's not what I meant. This," his eyes slip down her body. "It changes things."

She shakes her head at him a little sadly. "It doesn't change anything Lee."

"Kara." There's a whole host of questions he's probably supposed to ask, like _'how are you feeling?', 'are you okay with this?'… 'what do you want from me?'_ , but nothing comes to him. Kara's matter-of-fact calm is still too surreal.

"Next week the rest of the Cylons catch up and finally blow us out of the sky. Or the algae farms die and we all starve. Or we lose the tyllium refinery and there's no fuel left. Nothing changes." There's a certain note of fatality in her voice and it scares him almost as much as the thought that they've irresponsibly sentenced another person to this struggle. "We still need to find Earth. Nothing changes."

She's right, he realizes. A child is a long way off yet, if they even get there at all. It's a marathon, not a sprint, but it doesn't negate the sensation that he's just taken a punch to the solar plexus and he can't suck in enough air.

Kara's hand lingers on his arm as she passes him. "I've still got a shuttle to arrange. And you… you signed up to bash a few of those civilian leaders' heads and supposedly do something good with this government." She turns towards the ladder at the end of the catwalk. 

As she grabs the railing, she says, "Go build us that better tomorrow, Lee."

::

"I got a girl pregnant once," Lee blurts.

Kara raises an eyebrow. "I didn't know this was something you made a habit of."

"No," he tries to backtrack. "It wasn't like that." 

They're in his father's quarters and Kara's just told him what the Cylon had said about parents needing to die for their children to realize their full potential. His father has just left on some foolhardy mission to bring back the president, only it's not the Admiral who's gone; it's Bill who's off to find Laura and bring her home like he's her knight in shining armor with a Raptor as his steed. Tigh's in charge of the fleet and Kara's the CAG. And he's… well he's the frakking President of the Colonies. And if that isn't a colossal case of role reversal, he and Kara being the responsible ones for a change… he's not sure what the worlds have come to. All he knows is that he feels like he's walking around in shoes three sizes too big and any moment he's going to trip over his own toes. 

Lee's never told her about Gianne – never told anyone - about how he'd turned chicken and run when she'd told him about the baby. "It didn't end well," is all he says. He's not sure why he feels the need to confess this to Kara now, not since it, like everything else before the war, is ancient history. " _I_ didn't handle things very well."

"And you're telling me this now because…" she shrugs the question mark. "Cause I gotta tell you Lee, if that's supposed to make me all weak in the knees, you need to work on your delivery a little."

Lee takes a step closer to where she's leaning on the edge of the desk. "Yeah, as an opening, that really sucks." 

Kara just nods and crosses her arms. 

"What I'm trying to say here, is that I want to do better this time."

She takes a deep breath. "I'm not asking you for anything. You get that, right?"

"I know that." He looks up from his shoes and wonders if anybody else has noticed that she looks softer lately. Not any less tough; just not so many sharp edges and hard angles. Then again, he's also noticed how people try to avoid looking at her since she's been back, as if they're afraid of what they might see. "But I wish you would."

She opens her mouth, but decides whatever she was going to say isn't worth it and shakes her head as she shoves off from the desk and heads towards the hatch.

But Lee's not on _Galactica_ much anymore so he doesn't get to see her as much as he'd like. They need to talk about this, about the pregnancy and about what happened between them before she'd disappeared, not dance around it. 

Or at least he needs to. Kara's never been big on talking about feelings.

"Unless Sam's looking out for you. Making sure you're taking care of yourself, not doing anything stupid." It's a low blow and he knows it, but it has the desired effect. She stops, hand on the hatch wheel. "Have you even told _anyone_?" he pushes.

"I told you."

"Besides me."

She turns. "What did you say to Sam?" she says slowly, voice carefully controlled. 

"I told him you looked good." It wasn't entirely a lie, even though he hadn't said a word of it to her husband. 

"Don't, Lee."

"Don't what Kara?" It's still so easy to push her buttons that he can't help himself. Too easy to get a rise out of her. "Don't care about you? Don't worry? Don't wonder if it's even mine? Why'd you even bother telling me if you weren't going to let me be part of it?" 

Kara turns on him, eyes hard. "It can't be anyone else's." He trusts her on the math. She's still gripping the hatch wheel behind her. Lee figures he's about two sentences away from the receiving end of her right-hook, but he's tapped into this spring of emotions he's been trying to ignore since her Viper had pulled up alongside his in the nebula and there's no stopping it now.

"I just don't get it. My dad just leaves. The fleet's falling apart. We're making deals with the Cylons – we're taking sides in their civil war. And you, of all people," he waves a hand in her general direction, "are having a baby."

He rubs a hand over his eyes and takes a breath. He wishes being around Kara didn't always undermine his self-control. "None of this makes any sense."

There's a silence between them, punctuated by the hiss of the air recyclers and the muffled footsteps in the corridor. Inside the Admiral's quarters it's so quiet he can hear her lick her lips before she speaks again. 

"You said that you saw my Viper blow up, right?" Her voice is steadier than he feels as he tries not to remember how the last thing she'd said to him was _'just let me go'_.

"We still have the footage from my gun camera."

"Only I didn't die."

"But there's no way you could have survived-"

"Shut up Lee. You asked me. Let me tell it." When he nods, she continues, "All I know is that I went somewhere. I saw Earth. I came back. And I don't know how it happened or what it means. I don't know who put that compass in my head that led us to the base star, but it was all there. And it was all real to me."

"I've never doubted you Kara." 

She looks around the Admiral's quarters and mutters, "Well you're the only one."

"The Admiral believed you. He gave you a ship and a crew." Except the words feel hollow to him; Lee's not used to defending his father's actions without understanding his motive.

Kara shakes her head. "The Admiral believed me when I told him that I'd die before I gave up on getting back to Earth."

"Would you have?" Lee already knows the answer to that. When Kara puts her mind to something, she's more tenacious than a weapon's lock. It took her nearly a year to convince somebody to give her ships and a rescue party so they could bring the resistance back from Caprica, but she'd gone and somehow gotten Admiral Caine to back the mission.

"Lee, when I say I'm going to do something, I do it." She crosses her arms again and her tone suggests that she's really thinking she shouldn't have to point out the obvious to him. 

"Cottle said this probably shouldn't even have been possible," she continues. " _'You pilots have been exposed to enough radiation to sterilize half the fleet'_ were his exact words." 

"Kara, are you suggesting this baby isn't human?" The thought worries him, but it seems to have an even more profound effect on Kara; her eyes go wide for a second and her mouth twists in denial before she bites down on her bottom lip and shakes her head as if she could rattle the suggestion loose.

"No." She takes a step forward and she's standing toe-to-toe with him, invading his space and still shaking her head. "No way Lee. This," her fingers clutch the fabric of her uniform over her middle. "The Cylons can't do this. They've tried. Oh lords have they tried." She closes her eyes for a second to push back a memory. "They can't do this by themselves. But you and me, we did. This is what makes _me_ human." 

The ability to procreate and bear children. To ensure the preservation of the species. 

Exactly what they'd both been trying to do since the war started. Every time they'd stepped into a Viper and put their asses on the line to buy the rest of the fleet those few precious seconds to spin up their drives. The return to Caprica, then to Kobol. The battle of the Second Exodus… every sacrifice they've made has been about making sure humanity survives. Not only survives, but continues.

"Kara…" it comes out as a whisper and he's not sure what else follows because the way she's staring at him – that intensity-- takes his breath away.

"When I came back they wanted proof I wasn't a Cylon." She splays her fingers flat against her stomach. " _This_ is my proof." It's a completely irrational belief, unsupported and unproved, but Lee suspects that even Kara doesn't know what really happened to her out there in the nebula. She's holding on to this like he'd held onto his wings for so long; being an officer and a pilot was supposed to be a stepping stone, but the war had made it part of his identity. Kara's taken this pregnancy on as part of hers.

But no law is absolute; exceptions exist to explain the gaps that even the most perfect theorems can't. The Agathons proved this particular corollary false. And there are still people in the fleet who'd take any chance they could to discredit Kara and out another Cylon, not caring if they harmed her or the baby in the process.

Lee pulls Kara to him before she can pick up on that thought and how much it scares him. Her fingers slip under his jacket and tighten into his sides. He presses his lips to her forehead and after a minute he feels some of the tension ease out of her as she leans into him. 

"Proof enough for me," he mumbles and he feels her nod against him.

"It'd better be."

::

Earth is a waste. A waste of time, a waste of resources. A waste of hope. There'll be suspicions and accusation all over again, once the shock wears off.

Kara slips away with the tracker before Lee can start fussing about the amount of radiation she's sucking in. When she finds the crashed Viper, then the body, everything she thought she knew about herself is skewed sideways.

There's moment, just before she touches the blue flame from her lighter to the pyre, where she wonders if this is it? When her once and former shell is gone, will she continue to exist? Or will she simply wink out as suddenly as an FTL jump? Part of her thinks that might not be such a bad thing. 

But a larger part of her feels weighted down, tethered at her middle, bobbing and swaying along with the natural planetary gravity. One body acted upon by another. Isn't that how it always goes?

The wood is dry and even though there's no fuel left in the Viper's tank to accelerate the fire, the pyre catches fast and burns hot. Kara sits so close to the flames that's she's sweating on one side, numb with cold on the other. She watches the wind feed and blow until even her ashes are gone, spread far and wide across the once promised land.

When morning's grey light comes and the flames have guttered out, she's still here. Anchored and solid.

Kara's cold and stiff, despite the fire. She's been sitting too long, thinking too much. Neither is like her; one more strike in the column marked 'not the same old Starbuck'. Her right hand has cramped into a fist and it takes some rubbing and prying to get her fingers to open. But they're slow and clumsy. She fumbles the chain and drops it in the dirt between her feet. The sound the tags make when they hit the sand is flat and dead.

She takes a moment to stretch her hand, splaying her fingers wide so her tendons are pulled taught, and notices the sharp-edges of the tag have left red creases in her palm. The matching set from under her shirt fits snugly into the impression like a puzzle piece. She plucks the set off the ground, slips her own chain from over her head, and holds one in each hand. One set's cleaner, the ring un-tarnished, but they've got the same heft to them; they could be a matched set.

Tags can be re-issued and there's nothing truly unique about the ring, other than the memories attached to it; alone, they're not enough to prove the body she'd just burned really did belong to one Kara Thrace. If she'd been thinking, retrieving the body would have been the smart course of action. A few tissue sample… a smear of blood could've told them everything they needed to know; who she was, how long she's been dead…maybe, if they were lucky, how it happened. Might've even confirmed she'd been pregnant when she crashed.

Kara slips her own tags back in place and pockets the other set. Her bad knee pops when she stands and that much is still the same. 

She's still not sure how she feels about having a kid. The fleet's been running near empty a long time now; she's used to being bone-weary tired, used to feeling hungry and sick and just plain worn thin. Physically, nothing's changed. But other than a vaguely uneasy feeling when she tries to imagine what the next month or six will bring, she's just not sure; these days, there isn't a single person who knows what will happen in the next thirty-three minutes, and those who claim to are either bluffing, lying, or both. 

All she knows is that Kara Thrace is not the same woman she used to be, and it has very little to do with coming back from the dead. New Caprica changed her, as did Caprica before that. They woke something inside of her, made the war personal. Showed her what she was truly capable of. She still doesn't feel like she should be given the responsibility of being somebody's mother, but the idea doesn't terrify her on that gut level anymore. 

She knows she wasn't perfect at it with Kacey, but when she was most afraid of slipping, she'd prayed for patience and for strength, and begged the gods not to let her screw up. Somehow, she'd managed to say the right things when they needed to be said, do what needed to be done to keep them both alive, and somewhere, in one of the ships upstairs, there's one more little girl who came home, only a little worse for wear. There was a job to do and she got it done.

What she really wants to know right now, is if that was her Viper, and that was her body, then why did the gods see fit to send her back like this?

 

::

Later, after she's left _Colonial One_ , Lee thinks he should have asked Kara why she smelled like smoke.

"Dee shot herself," he tells her point-blank, and Kara's eyes go wide for just a second because while Dee isn't the first person to take their life since the disappointment of Earth, she's the last person any of them would have expected. Dee's always been the stable one. The one to call them on their shit and goad them all into slogging on.

She looks down at the box of personal effects on the table, the meager testament to the life of Anastasia Dualla. "Lee." She sits down hard on the arm of the sofa, like her knees have just given out. "I'm so sorry." Like this isn't just one more heartbreak in a string of heartbreaks since they went planet-side.

No, since before that. Not since the Three arrived and Kara found out that she'd married the enemy because Sam was the easier of the two of them to love. Or maybe it's been going on far longer than any of them care to remember. 

Lee sits down and she slides down onto the sofa beside him and unzips her flight suit and pushes it down to her waist without taking her eyes off the box on the table. He catches a whiff of wood smoke underscored by something more pungent, but he's distracted by how her hands are shaking. That's when he notices that she's pale, almost anemic under the fluorescent cabin lights.

"Hey, Kara, you okay?"

She finally looks up from the box. Gives his a weak smile. "You got anything to drink around here?"

Lee springs to his feet. "Water?" As much as he'd like to offer her something stronger. He could use something stronger himself today but he's decided it's one more way he's not going to be like his father.

"That'll do." She rubs at her eyes. Lee wonders when she slept last, what she's been up to. The familiar tug of missing her tightens in his chest, but he's so used to it by now that he can ignore it. Mostly. 

"She saved my life once," Kara tells him when he hands her the glass of water. "More than once, if you count all the coms chatter, but she literally pulled my ass out of the fire that time. I think my gloves were still smoking when we hit the hanger deck." She takes a long sip of the water and sinks back into the sofa. The fingers of both hands are laced around the glass as she rests it on the soft plane of her stomach. 

Lee can't help but stare. How many nights has he watched her slouched the same way, one foot propped on the arm of his chair while half a finger's worth of liquor sloshes around her glass each time she laughs at some joke that stopped being funny hours ago? There's a stillness to her now that's never been part of the Kara he knows. He bites down hard on the inside of his cheek to stop himself from pointing it out. It's not the only thing that feels off today.

"Do you remember that?" 

Her voice pulls him back and he takes a sip from his own glass. And nods slowly. Even though he tries to forget that he was the one who ordered Dee -- his _wife_ , with her limited ground combat experience, to do it. Tries to forget how he sat with Sam vibrating nervously beside him in the Raptor all the way back to _Galactica_ while he tried to swallow back the nausea, thinking he'd, in all likelihood, sent Dee to her death because he couldn't separate his feelings from his duty.

"Yeah." Lee's throat feels almost too tight to make sounds. "I remember that."

Kara swirls the water in her glass and watches the tiny vortex until it peters out. "Gods, I was so hopped up on morpha I couldn't keep my big mouth shut. Just kept talking and talking about loving Sam and loving you…bitching because you wouldn't cheat. Telling her all this crap she didn't need to hear, and the whole time she just worked on getting us both out of there. And she did it too, made it back by the skin of our teeth, but she got us out of there." She looks up at him. "The Old Man gave her a commendation. Did you know that?"

Of course he knew; he'd stood beside his father in the Admiral's quarters and saluted Dee while he'd tried not to see the accusation in her eyes. "Uh, yeah. For 'service above and beyond the call of duty'. I was there."

"The Admiral didn't know the half of it."

"You put her in for it, didn't you?" 

Kara drops her eyes back to the box again. 

She picks up one of the silver jacks from the table and rolls it between her fingers. "Not much to show for a life." 

Lee presses his eyes closed with the heel of his hand; he'd been thinking the same thing when Kara had come in, wondering where in her travels Dee had picked up a children's game.

"You shouldn't have sent her, Lee." Kara's starting at him. "My gloves were melted into my hands. Navigation was frakked. There's no way I could have flown that Raptor off the planet myself. We were dead in the water. It was an acceptable loss. You shouldn't have sent her."

It wasn't acceptable to Lee. "Sam was going to abandon his post and go after you."

"You could have… I don't know… shot him for mutiny, or something."

"He was a civilian then."

"So?" She's still playing with the jack, bouncing it in her palm. "Wouldn't be the first time since the war began." Her mouth twists in distaste at what they've become.

"Kara." _Be reasonable_ , he wants to say, _we don't leave people behind_. But that's a lie, because they do and they have. "I couldn't leave you behind."

And that's the truth. He never could, even when it meant endangering the rest of the fleet. Even when it meant putting lives on the line. Dee's life on the line.

"You didn't." Kara closes her hand into a fist around the jack. "And now you're stuck with me." She drops the piece back into the box. "So when you're beating yourself up over this later, remember that I'm here because of Dee. That is her legacy." She stands and brushes past the chair he's sitting in. Lee grabs her wrist and she stops, turns towards him so he's eye-level with her middle. He can feel her watching him as he takes in the subtle new curves of her body, a body he knows so well from all the years they've lived in shared quarters, all the times he's fought her and the too-few times he's loved her.

It's subtler than shouting at him, but far more effective. She meets his eyes, holds his stare. Kara's never been as good as Dee with words; coarse and blunt where his wife is… was precise and full of grace, but she's equally capable of getting her point made.

"Do you believe there's something after this life?" he asks, because Kara's the only person he knows who's come back from the dead, and today she seems to have all the answers. "Do you think she's somewhere better?" His voice catches a little as the full weight of the day leans heavily on him.

She pauses and the silence draws out between them. When he thinks she isn't going to answer, she looks up from his hand and says, "There's something."

It's not until after she's gone and the hint of smoke still lingers, that Lee realizes that she hadn't really answered the question.

::

Gaeta tries to take Galactica for himself in the name of the greater good, and Kara doesn't lie to Lee; it does feel good to be alive. To feel the blood rush through her veins and her nerves sing with the wire-tight thrum of adrenaline as they shoot and run and fight their way through the ship. It's what she was bred for, after all. It's what she knows best.

And then it comes crashing down with the shot that takes Sam out. 

It's only luck, she'll think later as Sam's mouth twists because they're drilling into his skull, that she'd crouched to strip the Marine of his extra ammo at that exact moment. Only luck that the bullet split the air close enough that she'd heard it whine past her ear and not close enough for her to feel its heat with the center of her forehead. Only luck that Sam, big, brave, honorable Sam chose that second to turn back for her. Only luck, because any other explanation makes her stomach coil and her hands shake and she doesn't need those kinds of thoughts filling her head right now, not when Sam needs her.

Cottle looks at her with something like pity, but he doesn't kick her out of the infirmary when he should. He doesn't even grumble in her direction when she drags a chair around to Sam's bedside and settles in to wait. He presents her with the bullet as a trophy, a souvenir of their so-called victory, and it's not until later, once the EEG tells them her husband won't ever wake, that Kara realizes it's one of the few pieces she has left of Sam.

She wonders if Lee kept the silver jacks.

 

::

It's not a date, Kara'd told him; they're so far past that, so calling it a date was stupid. But that's what it amounts to. Drinks at Joe's, which is more like Lee drinking, and Kara scowling at him over the glass of ice water when she's not looking over his shoulder at the piano somebody dragged over from gods-knew-where. He's hoping for something a little more than awkward conversation about shift reports and supply recons and political delegates.

"Hey," he says. Her eyes snap back in his general direction, her eyebrow quirked at a question he hasn't asked.

Lee looks back over his shoulder, but there's nothing out of the ordinary going on. "Waiting for someone?" he asks.

Kara shrugs. "Just thought I saw somebody I knew."

"Is there anybody left on this ship we _don't_ know?" He expects her to make a crack about this, but she doesn't, just glances away again and sips her drink. The board in his office lists just over thirty thousand souls, and Lee's not that funny after all. It's confirmed when she squints at him and shakes her head.

Neither of them says anything for a while. They watching people they both know come and go, and it's not entirely uncomfortable; he's known Kara for so long that small talk doesn't really cut it anymore. They've swapped all the Academy tales there are to swap, called each other's bull a million times over already, and well, when it comes to war stories… they were both there. 

It's just that this isn't how Lee'd ever imagined courting the mother of his child; whenever he'd pictured the future, it'd always been 'school, service, marriage, children', in exactly that order. He feels he should be doing _something_ more than visiting her ship on official business and hoping to get in a conversation or two post-briefing or pre-public speaking. He just can't keep circling in a holding pattern, waiting for the day that Kara decides the baby isn't just some big 'maybe, if they don't get blown up first' and admits that, yeah, there's a future out there with their names on it, and it's not so far off.

Beside him, Kara shifts, leans back in her chair slightly and slips a hand under her sweatshirt. Lee hears a buckle pop and a drawn out sigh from her that sounds unmistakably like relief. His mouth must be hanging open because she asks, "What?"

"Did you just…" he trails off as a group of off-duty uniforms crowd past their table.

Kara raises an eyebrow and waits for him to finish. "Undo my pants in public?" she deadpans. "Wouldn't be the first time."

"You did, didn't you?" And really, why is it such a shock to him? It's not the most outrageous thing she's ever done, not even close.

She's smirking at him, the way she used to when the war was young and she would sit in the front row of his briefing while he was trying to live up to the responsibilities of being one of the few remaining officers in the fleet. "Space is getting to be a premium here." She pats her stomach gently. "I'm gonna need to requisition coveralls soon."

It's the first time she's ever even hinted to him about the baby in a future-tense and Lee thinks he's been wrong this whole time; it's not a just conversation topic or a 'maybe' to wonder about to her – it's a state of being. And he's been so worried about doing things the right way that he's missing out on it completely.

"I want to see," he blurts without thinking. 

"S'cuse me?" Kara looks up at him sharply, vaguely amused and a little bit surprised.

He tilts his head towards her and her unbuttoned pants. "I want to see," he repeats. "You know… show me yours and I'll show you mine."

"Are you propositioning me, Lee?" Almost a dare.

"Maybe I am," he shoots back and doesn't blink, because this feels familiar and right. It feels like what courting _Kara_ should be. He doesn't want to feel so isolated from her over on Colonial One anymore.

She doesn't break his stare as she considers. Something other than the bland annoyance she's been wearing all evening flashes across her face before she finishes her drink in one long swallow, then grabs his sleeve and drags him out of the bar. She weaves them through the corridors to what used to be his office… is her office now. The irony isn't lost on him. She flicks on the small desk lamp as he dogs the hatch. 

Lee's under no illusion about what comes next; they've both got too many strings, too much baggage for just another casual liaison; she's still married, after all, and asking her to cheat now while Sam lies in the infirmary is… unfathomable. He just watches as Kara slowly unzips her sweatshirt and lets it slide down her arms. She turns slightly so she's in profile, and pushes the bottom of her tanks up with one hand. She holds her breath as he stares. The desk lamp casts soft shadows across her skin that accentuate the fullness of her breasts and the curve of her belly where her muscles have started to pull thin. The stitching from her pants has left a deep zigzag impression in her skin. Lee clenches his hand into a fist to keep from reaching to smooth it out.

He looks up to find her watching him again, waiting, but he can't read her expression. He thought he'd seen every side of Kara there is to see: fighting mad or caught up in the euphoric battle high, giddy with their buck-naked honesty, crushed with grief… worn to the breaking point. This almost shy hesitation is completely new territory for him. 

"I'm not going to break." The invitation sends heat rushing through him. She doesn't reach for his hand, waits for him to bridge the distance, but she does take a step closer so all he has to do is reach out.

He touches her and it surprises him how warm the skin under his fingers is. And how firm. The scar from where she was shot is stretched and distorted, the stitch-marks pulled into defiant pale streaks. Lee feels a sudden surge of giddy panic bubbling up in his chest and lets out something that sounds to him like a harsh laugh to just keep himself from imploding. How many times has he almost lost her? Three? Four? The next time really might kill him.

Except Kara's standing right here and no matter what happens, she's inextricably tied to him now. He's almost crushed by how much he wants it. Not a just a 'maybe'. 

This. With her.

"Hey." Kara touches his cheek. Her eyes are dark in the room's half-light, but he can hear the concern in her voice.

He remembers to breathe. "Can you… do you ever feel it?" he stutters. "Moving, I mean." He keeps his head down, unable to take his eyes away from how she fills the breadth of his hand and fits the curve of his palm.

"Sometimes. Bit more this week." And after a pause where she tilts her head like she's listening… waiting for something to happen. Then she shakes her head, "Not right now. Must be sleeping." She shivers and looks around for her sweatshirt.

Lee reluctantly lets go and reaches the shirt off the ground, holds it open for her like a coat. He hesitates, not wanting the evening to end just yet, but just then Kara yawns deeply and tries to cover it with the back of her hand. He notices how deep the circles are under her eyes and how she sways slightly as she pulls the sweatshirt zipper all the way up again. There's a blanket thrown over the back of the short sofa, and a pillow lying on the floor. He doesn't ask why she's not bunking in the senior officer's quarters.

"When are you on duty?"

"'Nother five hours and change." She leans in and rests her head against his shoulder, yawns again. "This gestating thing's kicking my ass."

"Come here." Lee pulls her down to the sofa, grabs the pillow and goads her until she stretches out with her feet hanging over one armrest, her head on his lap. He slips his hand down between her shirt and her stomach and just lets it rest there against the warmth of her skin. Feels her breathing slow as she relaxes into him.

"So what's it feel like?"

"Like… " she trails off as she considers; taking the time to contemplate is a luxury she hasn't allowed herself yet. "Like the very first time you execute a low-atmosphere fly-over in perfect formation. You know?" She tilts her head slightly so she can see him.

"Yeah," he says. He'd been asking about feeling the baby move, but she'd just summed up the whole experience so far: complicated, potentially terrifying, with equal measures danger, exhilaration and hope that they might actually pull this off. "Like you feel alive for the first time."

"I was thinking more like 'hung-over and praying you aren't going to puke in your helmet every time you go into a roll.'"

Lee stares at her, looking for signs that he's been reading too much into this moment. Then her bottom lip twitches and she breaks into a wide grin. Under his palm, her stomach shakes as she laughs at his seriousness. He feels something ease inside him, like she's just let him in on a secret and he gives her shoulder a nudge. 

"But yeah, alive too," she says once she's sobered. She slips her hand over his and runs her finger back and forth across the back of his hand.

"Scared?"

Kara tenses, and Lee's just starting to kick himself for pushing her about it and breaking the easy mood. 

"I had a daughter once." The words come out in a rush and he feels her heart speed up under his hand. The air around them is heavy, thick with the importance of the revelation.

Lee doesn't move, doesn't say anything. Just waits for her to decide on her words. When the seconds stretch into minutes and she doesn't say anything more, he whispers, "I didn't know." Because he didn't; there was never anything in her file. Lee realizes there are whole pieces of her history that he doesn't know, things she plays close and never shares with anyone else.

"She wasn't really mine. Turned out Leoben was frakking with me about that too," she tells him in a quiet voice and Lee relaxes again. Events start slipping into place and he remembers seeing her, very briefly, getting off one of the last Raptors from New Caprica with a little blond moppet in her arms, but he hadn't had the time to wonder about it back then and it had slipped his mind since.

"But for a week… maybe two… I don't know, it was hard to keep track of time… he had me convinced she was." Lee gets the sense that there's something she's desperate for him to understand from this admission. He's just not sure what.

"Tell me about her," he says instead. After a moment, Kara does. She tells him how she tried to ignore the kid at first, tried to not to have anything to do with her, and how that had backfired when Kacey'd gotten hurt. She tells him about sitting next to her tiny body, so still and pale in that hospital bed, and praying, not for forgiveness because she'd been unwilling and unwanting, but bargaining with the gods, offering herself to them if they'd just let her child wake up and be okay.

"If Kacey's mother hadn't been there when we landed, I wouldn't have known any better. She'd probably still be mine." The sofa creaks as she rolls on to her side so he can't see her face anymore, but her voice shifts, hardens. "I can do this, Lee. You, and Tigh… gods, half my pilots… you all think this is nuts. 'What the frak is Starbuck gonna do with a kid?'"

"Kara- "

"I know you're always checking up on me," She cuts him off. "I hear the talk. I see the way they look at me." She sits up and turns to him. The hardness isn't just in her words; it's in the set of her jaw too. "If coming back from the dead doesn't scare them enough, the craziest pilot in the fleet polluting what's left of the gene pool does."

"That doesn't scare me, Kara," he says gently, because he doesn't want her to misunderstand. "You and me having a baby? Together. That doesn't scare me." He touches her arm, slides his hand under the angle of her elbow, begs her to just stay and hear him out. "You said it before – anything can happen. We might not be here tomorrow. Not seeing our kid grow up? _That_ terrifies me."

She doesn't look away, but something in her face softens. "You think too much." And then quieter, more determined, "I'm doing this Lee. I'm not going to frak this up."

"I know you won't." He watches as she holds his stare, probing his sincerity. "But you look like crap while you're trying," he adds. It breaks the tension. He slides down in the cushions until his head is resting on the back of the sofa. He tugs at her arm until she relents and leans into him. "You've got time before your shift. Come on, get some rest."

"You know, just because you got to see me half-naked and pass out on my couch," she mumbles as she settles in, "still doesn't make this is a date." 

Lee kisses the top of her head and decides it's not worth arguing semantics.

::

If there's one thing Kara regrets about the baby, it's that she never told Sam about it properly. Not that sitting him down and telling him "Oh, by the way, you remember right before I died? I frakked Lee and now I'm having his kid" was the way to do it, but she at least owed him something like that, not the rumors and scuttlebutt. 

Actually, she's not even sure if he knew and now it's too late to ask him. So she sits in the cocoon of near-darkness beside his tub while he mutters about vector corrections and flow pressure and recites poetry about the stars. She tells him about all the things that happened on New Caprica when she was taken and all the things that've happened since, and hopes that some of it will filter through all the new sensory input he's busy processing. She tells him all the things a wife should've told her husband instead of pushing him away; all her oaths, all her sins. All the things he'd wanted to hear from her back then. But she doesn't apologize about the baby. 

After all, Sam never told her he was a Cylon. 

It's funny – there's part of her that knows Sam would have been genuinely happy for her. He would have been smug about it too, like he'd known all along that she wasn't as damaged and incapable as she'd claimed. He always had this way of seeing the best in her, even when there wasn't much good to be found. 

Sam blinks and the lights in the room wink back.

The hard chair Kara's perched on makes her legs go numb after too long and her back aches. She shifts and pulls out her notepad and Hera's drawing again. The lights blink and she taps her pen against her teeth in time. Blink. Wink. Tap. There's a connection here, a pattern to within the music notes that she still can't see.

"The surface area of a star is equal to three one four one five nine two six five times the square of its radius. Port side hydraulic pressure decrease by point zero zero two," he monotones. "The grass is always greener on the other side."

"I think I figured that one out already Sammy," she answers absently and scribbles another series of fractions on her notepad. 

Sam also would've understood what it's like to only need one hand to count off all the things that prove you're still alive.

::

"You're frakking nuts, you know that right?" Lee's all but shouting. His voice bounces off the walls of the arms locker, amplifying his anger at Kara for being pig-headed about this. 

"Never said I wasn't." She answers indifferently before she turns away from him to grab several boxes of ammo from a shelf. 

Blood pounds in his temples and Lee's not sure what's got him more fired up; Kara going on this mission to rescue Hera, or Kara not yelling back. She passes him the boxes and reaches for a pair of thigh holsters. Lee grabs her arm, desperate to get her to just stop, long enough to see how crazy letting a pregnant woman lead an assault team really is, even if nobody else of this ship will. Everybody else is too wrapped up in bigger things, his father maybe more so than the rest of them, practically crippled to inaction and blinded by his unwillingness to let go of the two great loves of his life.

"Frak, Lee," she jerks her arm back. "If you're not going to help, then get out of my way. We're kind of on the clock here." The thud of boots in the hall double-timing it past the locker punctuates the urgency in her voice, but she stops long enough to meet his eye, a half-assed attempt at intimidation on her part. 

Lee backs off a step, hands up in surrender. "Kara, just think about this for a minute."

"I have thought about this. I haven't thought of much else since Boomer took her out from under our noses." She tosses the gun belts onto the table with more than a little force, then plants her hands on her hips. "I've thought about how to get Helo a Raptor and how to get him off the ship when the Admiral said we couldn't afford to go looking for one little girl. Or how 'bout how Athena died once…how she begged her husband to shoot her with her own service piece on the off-chance she'd be able to download on to the right ship and get her daughter back, and how she doesn't even have that option anymore because we took resurrection away. Because they love her, Lee. Both of them, they're willing to die to get her back safe." She drops her gaze for a second, swallows, then looks back up. Her voice is steely and it hits him harder than any punch she's ever thrown at him. "And I've thought about how if Hera was my daughter, I'd be doing the exact same thing."

Now it's Lee's turn to look away, and he does, down to the swell of her stomach, not huge, not even close yet, but unmistakably full of the life inside her. And he believes her. Believes her determination, believes in her fire and her conviction. And he also believes that there's no talking her out of this.

He opens one of the lockers, then the next and the next until he finds what he's looking for. The body armor won't cover near enough of her to satisfy him, but it's something, at least. He slips the vest over her head and crouches down to adjust the buckles at the sides so it covers most of her torso. She lifts her arms to let him and helps him pull it so it fits close. It won't be near adequate against a Centurion, but Lee considers this as close to victory as he's going to get. 

"Just make sure that when you bring Helo and Athena's daughter back," he looks up at her from the floor as he pulls the last strap in tight, "you make sure you bring our kid back too."

Kara threads her fingers through his hair and squeezes. She nods, and Lee believes she will do this, too.

::

When the last alarm has been silenced and the popping and groaning of metal stressed beyond its breaking point stops, and she realizes that they are, for the most part, still breathing, Kara's legs turn to sand and she sinks heavily to the deck plating beside the nav computer.

The air in the CIC is thick with smoke and the smell of spilled blood and burnt cordite turn her stomach. Sparks burst from a console above her head, but she barely flinches when they hit her arm; the adrenaline's been spent and gone and all she wants to do is let her eyes stay closed a few minutes longer. She's done. She's finished the job she was sent back to do.

Almost.

"Kara!"

Lee's voice seems overly loud over the ringing in her ears from the shooting and the chaos before. She opens her eyes, and he's right there in front of her, face smudged with worry and soot and sweat and other people's blood. At least she hopes it belongs to other people.

"I'm not deaf. I'm fine," she snaps at him and knocks his hands away from where they're probing at the sides of the body armor so she can undo the buckles and toss it aside. It's hot and it's making it hard to breathe. Around them, bodies are stirring, reaching out for survivors, affirming that the people that matter to them are still there.

Lee doesn't seem to have heard, or else he doesn't believe her because he's still got his fingers twisted in the fabric of her shirt. She grabs his wrist and he finally stops long enough to look at her. 

"Lee." He blinks. She's finally got his attention. "I'm okay. We're okay. I swear." She looks over his shoulder to where his father is crouched over the president. "Go help your father."

His hand lingers on her hip a moment longer. "Don't scare me like that, Kara."

"You think you were scared," she mutters once his back is turned.

::

_The Blue…_

When the baby finally arrives, it's almost anti-climactic.

After his father leaves for the last time, Lee wants nothing more than to take Kara by the hand and disappear, start walking and never look back. He's tired of everybody looking at them to fix things. Leave the tatters of humanity to straighten themselves out. Maybe it's exhaustion doing the talking, maybe it's grief. He's not sure. 

But there are all sorts of practicalities to consider. 

"Don't get any funny ideas about taking off for one of those cold continents." Lee overhears Cottle lecture Kara one day, somewhere around the time they started making plans to split off into groups. "I want to witness one of those famous Starbuck miracles first hand before I die, not just clean up after it." Cottle jabs a finger in her direction. "I'm too old to freeze my ass off while I'm waiting for you to get on with it."

Lee can't hear her response over the noise in the planning tent, but she's standing with her hands on her hips, head canted like she's about to lay into the good doctor, and he takes an automatic step towards them, ready to call her off. Then Cottle grunts and waves her away before he moves on to the next person waiting for his attention. Kara looks at him, lips pressed together, eyes narrowed, before she dips her head to cover the smile.

Lee has no desire to freeze his ass off either – he'll stick to that excuse when she calls him on his abuse of power. He flips through his clipboard full of assignments until he finds Cottle's posting and adds his and Kara's names to the list. 

He often thinks about asking her to marry him, almost goes through with it once or twice. But then he'll catch her watching him sidelong, studying him like she's looking for signs he's changed his mind about being with her or she's waiting for him to say something that might upset the fragile balance they've found, and he'll think ' _Not today._ '

::

Even after all this time, Kara's still not sure how she feels about the baby. When she's being completely honest with herself, she'll admit the responsibility terrifies her, until she remembers that it wasn't so long ago that she and her fellow pilots held the lives of the entire fleet in their hands. 

So that's not what's causing this sensation of being off-balance. She feels a shift in her perception, gradual, but still there; some nights she still looks up and aches for the stars, but it's the dull, familiar throb of memory, not the burning sting of regret this time. The war is truly over and they've got nowhere else to go. Their old lives – old selves-- have trickled and faded away. It doesn't feel like giving up this time. It feels like starting fresh.

The pace of colonization here is much slower than New Caprica, the sense of urgency, the pressure to ' _hurry up and settle in_ ' isn't there. Perhaps it's because this planet is different – lush, clement… bountiful. Her body seems to take this as a signal to virtually explode into awkward curves and oddly rounded angles ( _"Blossom," Lee corrects right before she punches him in the bicep. She doesn't tell him how she loves the wonder in his eyes when he looks at her now._ ). But that doesn't bother her all that much either, except in the late afternoons when the heat makes her miss _Galactica's_ carefully controlled climate. It's just more proof that she _is_ Kara Thrace and not something else. 

Because dead girls don't thrive. 

There's just _something_ … like an itch between her shoulder blades that she can't quite reach, or the scent in the air just before the winds change.

::

They find some land near a stream, far enough up a hill that it feels like they're alone, and build a house together. They haven't even bothered to consider an alternative. It just seems like the next step. 

"It's too small," Lee says after they've laid out the foundation. 

"Better than my old apartment."

Lee turns to watch her stretch out on a rock in the middle of the clearing, eyes closed, face tilted up into the sun. "Your apartment wasn't bad."

"It was a rat-trap." She answers by rote.

"Hot in the summer, no heat in the winter. Rent was a crime. I've heard it all a million times." Lee takes a swallow from his canteen and comes to sit beside her. The light breeze dries the sweat on his skin quickly. He relishes how good it feels to be out working in the open air, even if the itch he's starting to feel tells him he's going to pay for it with the sting of a sunburn later. 

"You forget, I saw it before." He doesn't need to add _'before Zak died'_ and _'before you let it fall apart'_ because they both know that one event directly correlates to the other.

There's a beat of silence in which she takes the canteen from his hands. "No," she says after a swallow. "It wasn't that bad. It was actually a pretty good place. You know," she shrugs. "Before."

"Well I think this place'll be almost as good."

Kara leans her head against his shoulder, one hand absently rubbing her stomach, and considers the crude floor plan. "Maybe better."

::

Once upon a time, Kara'd teased Lee about a porch and a swing. She'd been mocking him, covering up her fears that the next CAP would turn either one of them into nothing more than another forgettable statistic. 

They don't have the luxury of a swing, but the narrow extension of platform that keeps their small house off the ground and out of the worst of the rainy summer season's runoff seemed to be his favorite place to sit and wait for her.

"Hey," he greets her.

Her cheeks are hot and her hair is plastered to her neck with sweat and afternoon humidity when she eases down beside him. She's lost track of dates; the length of the days on this planet differ from the military precision of _Galactica's_ clocks, but the constant pressure low in her belly makes her hips ache. It turns every trip back up the hill from the settlement into a chore and whispers _'soon, very soon'_ with each heavy step. She couldn't feel more unprepared.

"Hey," she answers once she's caught her breath. "You wouldn't happen to have a nice cold bottle of Ambrosia or a Picon ale stashed around here, would you? Maybe a six-pack?"

"Sure, but you're going to have to haul your ass back down to the creek where I've got them chilling if you want one. Bring me one while you're at it." He pretends not to see the way she narrows her eyes at him and doesn't look up from the clothes he's mending. 

Not until she takes a half-hearted swipe at him and says, "Funny." She drinks deeply from her warm water bottle and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. "You shouldn't tease a girl like that. Especially not in my condition."

"Your 'condition' is the only time I can get away with it." Lee edges away from her, just far enough to be beyond her reach. "Makes you too slow to catch me."

She considers a 'Frak you Adama', or something along those lines, but she's hot and she's tired, and that feeling of things rushing by too fast is nagging at her again. She tells him, "So I found you a wet-nurse," instead. 

Lee tenses, and right away Kara knows it's going to be another one of _those_ conversations. The ones he doesn't want to have because they mean that he's going to have to acknowledge how possible… no, scratch that… how _probable_ it is that something could happen to her out here on the new frontier that will leave him alone with a tiny vulnerable being completely dependent on him. Cottle's been beating the dearly departed horse with all the things that could possibly go wrong: hemorrhaging… infections… strokes… seizures. All his warnings make her wonder if they weren't safer in the vacuum of space with a dozen Raiders on their doorstep. 

"Nice girl," she continues, ignoring the way he's paying far too much attention to the length of his stitches to not be avoiding her. "Likes kids. Well, I hope she likes 'em. She's got three. Her baby's only a couple months old and Cottle says the timing'll be good- "

"Kara I don't want to hear this." 

He clenches his jaw and goes back to his mending, ignoring the way she's standing there, her own hands fisted now, burning cheeks having nothing to do with the heat. It's not the first time they've argued about it; last week he'd accused her of being obsessed with dying on them. 

She just doesn't know how to voice her terrible fear that once the baby comes… once she loses that wonderfully constant weight that's grounding her, she'll have nothing left to tether her to them. That she won't be there to take care of them.

On another day, she might have pushed him, but she's so tired right now. She's hot and she's tired of arguing with him about this. 

"Fine," is all she says. She turns on her heel and leaves. Her boots crunch on the dirt path, away from the direction she'd just come. She's got nothing left to fight him with today. 

It takes Kara almost as long to get back down to the settlement the long way as it took her to hike back up the hill home the first time, but she's not going to give Lee the satisfaction of shutting her down and avoiding the conversation by turning around and going back. Besides, the creek is cool and just deep enough that she can lay back and float. She revels in the relief of near-weightlessness; not quite zero-g, but close enough that when she closes her eyes she can almost pretend that she's back in space, just drifting. 

There's a screeching noise coming from the Agathon's place. Kara stops in their doorway to watch Hera standing in the middle of the kitchen, a snotty mess of tears and noise, kicking and pulling at Sharon, who's trying to get a washcloth somewhere in the vicinity of the girl's face. The Cylon's great shiny hope for the future and humanity's salvation is pitching a tantrum on a scale the old Starbuck would have been impressed with. Even now, she feels a little bit of pride in the kid; she's got a lot of fight in her.

Helo stops beside Kara with an armful of kindling and a soft smile on his face. "Kara," he greets her finally, as if he's just realized she's there, completely blocking his doorway. 

"Hey Karl."

"Weren't you just here?"

Kara shrugs and just keeps watching as Athena finally scores a direct hit on the washcloth run. Hera's shrieks drop a register as she starts to lose steam. Sharon looks up at them leaning against the doorframe and rolls her eyes in exasperation when she sees that neither Karl or Kara are coming to her rescue any time soon.

Kara leans her head against his shoulder and sighs. "Tell me it's worth it Karl."

"It's worth it Karl," he answers, never taking his eyes off his wife and daughter. Kara jabs him in the ribs and his smile broadens. He turns to her, lets his eyes drop to her very swollen belly for a second, and says, "It's so worth it," like he's sharing the most amazing secret. He ruffles her hair and gives her a shove out of the way, back toward the main street. "Go home, Kara. Go work it out with him."

It's dark by the time she's dragged herself back up the hill again and she's ready to collapse when Lee comes running to meet her. He's covered in dirt and scratches and sweat and grime, and there's something a little wild in the way he says her name and pulls her into their softly-lit home. 

"Kara what were you thinking?" His voice is already high and tight, just this side of being under control. "What if you'd gotten hurt in the dark? You can't just take off every time you're pissed at me right now. What if something happens to you? What about the baby?"

And she stands with her hands on her hips and lets the seconds tick by until he realizes what he's just said. He closes his eyes and drops his head, finally conceding. 

Things are quiet after that, for a while. Kara helps him clean up all the scrapes and bandages the gash in his shin. "You didn't think to bring a lantern with you?" she chastises him as she brushes fine grains of gravel out of his skin with a damp rag.

"I did," he protests. "That root ambushed me."

"Uh huh."

"Kara," he sits back. She folds the rag and wipes imaginary dirt off the backs of her hands to avoid looking at him. She's too tired for a lecture. 

"Don't scare me like that again."

"You should be scared, Lee." She doesn't bother to list the reasons this time because the way he's clutching her arm tells her he's already counted through them a hundred times over while she was gone, and probably more.

Lee slides a hand up her shoulder, hesitates with it on the back of her neck, then pulls her to him. She rests her forehead against his throat and feels his pulse against her cheek. Her mouth curves as she feels Lee grunt when the baby turns over between them and hoofs him in the gut in the process.

"You taught him to do that, didn't you?"

She just shrugs and presses her lips to his throat instead.

::

"Oh frak."

It's another ten seconds before the contraction eases enough that Kara can answer him. "Don't say that unless you mean it."

Lee looks up from between her knees, but she's got her eyes closed and she's sucking in lungfulls of the humid air, stealing herself against the next wave. Outside, the rain is coming down in torrents, pounding the roof with gravelly white noise that drowns any other sound except the mortar-fire thunder rolling over the hills. Even if he stood outside and yelled at the top of his lungs, nobody would be able to hear him.

"Lee?" Her voice already sounds tight again. And tired. Labor had come on sharply, hitting her hard and fast as a combat launch, but leaving little fuel in the tank for the long haul. If Kara knew he kept thinking about the whole situation in flight metaphors, she'd probably hit him, but it keeps his hands steady when he brushes her hair off her sticky forehead and gives the illusion of control and authority as he talks her through each contraction. Dogfights, he can handle, ground assaults, he's familiar with… commanding a battleship, comfortable. Childbirth - not so much.

"'Oh frak' what, Lee?" she bites out as she leans in and her fingers dig into his forearms. Lee almost wishes she would scream because at least there's a chance somebody might hear and bring help. But this is Kara; she just grits her teeth and grips him harder. 

"It's nothing," he tries to brush it off, but her fingers are digging in hard enough to bruise. "Just thought I saw something. No big deal."

He thinks he's going to get away with it too when she doesn't press him further. And then her hands relax and she starts to breath evenly again. "Lee?" She lets her head rest heavily against the wall and cracks one eye open to stare him down. "What did you see?"

She's calling his bluff. There's no point denying something she's probably going to figure out herself in the next few seconds.

"A hand." And now that he's said it, he can feel the fear burn the back of his throat. "Five tiny little fingers. No head. Just a hand." Lee bites down on his tongue to keep the panic from spilling out. 

Kara's eyes go wide for a moment. It's not exactly bad, yet. But it's not text-book either, and Lee doesn't have the slightest clue what to do if things do take a turn for the worse. 

"Oh frak," she gasps as another contraction steals her breath. 

"Yeah."

She leans into him again and a look of wild determination flickers across her face. It's something he's only seen a few times: through the canopies of their locked Vipers as she'd towed him home, spare seconds before they'd jumped, or from the business end of her sidearm as she stared down Racetrack and her merry band of mutineers and dared them to just try and shoot Lee. It's the look that says she's putting all her chips on the table and she's going to walk out a winner, no matter what the cards say. Lee only wishes he could be so confident.

Kara shifts, clutches his shoulders as he helps her move upright. She tucks her forehead into his neck, leveraging every last ounce of this planet's pathetic single G as she bears down. Her breath is hot and quick as she mouths something that sounds like _'ohgodsohgodsohgodsohgods'_ into his skin. And then she sags against him, shaking, and he can feel not just that tiny hand between her legs, but the hard crown of a head too, so he tells her _'one more time, one more time, almost there'._ She digs her fingers into his back and pushes again.

::

"Your bridge is out." Cottle greets them from the doorway in his usual gravelly voice. 

"We don't have a bridge," Kara answers without looking up from the baby curled against her breast. "Never got around to building one."

The Doc grunts. "Well, you're going to need one now with all this rain. Had to go three kilometers upstream before it was shallow enough to cross. Does wonders for the arthritis." He kicks his wet shoes off outside the door, drapes his jacket on the coat hook, before he crosses the room and pulls a stool up to the bedside. "Now let's see what we've got here."

Lee's hovering over Cottle's shoulder. "Wait. How did you know to come?" 

Cottle looks up from the small bundle now in his arms. "I might have spent most of my career on a battleship, but she isn't the first pregnant woman I've taken care of."

Kara fusses with the baby's blanket as she pretends not to notice Lee staring at her. 

"She was in labor yesterday? And you let her come back here?"

Cottle's dismissive as settles the baby into the crook of his arm so he can rifle through his bag for his stethoscope. "Where else was I going to send her? These things take hours and the clinic's not set up for that yet. I told her to call when it was time."

"But you knew yesterday?" Lee's voice rises as he turns to her. "Kara did you have any idea?"

"I was kind of there, Lee," she says once she's satisfied that Cottle isn't going to drop her child. Lee's pacing now, running his hands through his hair as he works himself into a full head of steam. It's the adrenaline, she knows, like coming down after combat. The last six hours had been intense.

"All the times you've lectured me about what can go wro- " Lee's cut off by a high-pitched bleating that sounds more like it's coming from a wounded goat, than the tiny creature on the bed. 

"She's on the small side, which is expected with all the rationing and food shortages, but her lungs are strong," Cottle announces, in case it wasn't obvious to anyone else in the room. "Heart sounds good too." 

By the time the doctor decrees their daughter healthy, she's managed to work herself up to full-blown cries of outrage at being poked and prodded and manhandled. Something new and not entirely unpleasant knocks the air out of Kara's lungs and before she fully understands what she's doing, she's got her child tucked tight against her chest and she's stroking her fingers along her daughter's palm-wide shoulders as intuitively as the first time she'd reached for a Viper's yoke.

"Take the baby," Cottle orders Lee once he's updated his battered notebook with the record of the birth. "Mom and I have business to look after here."

Kara looks up with a start when she realizes he's talking about her.

::

 

It's a short while later when Cottle emerges and claps Lee on the shoulder. "You kids did good," he says, and Lee knows that's high compliment coming from the Doc. "I told her to take it easy, watch out for infection, get lots of rest. So good luck with that." Then he pulls up the collar of his raincoat and takes his leave.

Lee watches him make his way down the wet path until he's around the bend and out of sight. "Does he think she's actually going to listen to us?" he asks the bundle in his arms. His daughter stares back up at him and doesn't have an answer. "Yeah, me either."

"Gee Lee, she's not even a day old and you guys are already ganging up on me."

His feels a rush of blood to his cheeks and turns to find Kara watching him. She's wrapped herself in a blanket and she's leaning heavily against the doorframe, looking too pale and tired for his liking. "You should sit down, at least," he says.

She winces as she takes a step forward. "I don't think I want to. You," she brushes a thumb over the baby's forehead, "are very stubborn and hard-headed."

"I can't imagine where she gets that from."

Kara leans against him. "No idea." She rests her head against his shoulder, lets him bear some of her weight.

Lee studies the baby's still swollen features. "I can't figure out who she looks like more."

"Well that's definitely Sam's nose."

He turns so sharply that it startles the baby and she starts to cry again. The corner of Kara's mouth twitches. "What? You don't see the resemblance?" she asks innocently as she reaches for her daughter.

"Funny Kara."

"Would've been if you'd said it."

He watches as she adjusts the baby in her arms so she's cradling her like a pyramid ball, notices the unconscious sway of her hips as she rocks and soothes her. He's honestly surprised at how at ease she is. He didn't expect it, but then, he'd never expected how good she'd been, how personally she'd taken the success of each class of nuggets she'd graduated either. Even now, Kara never fails to surprise him.

"When she squints like that," Kara says softly as the baby's eyes get heavy with sleep, "she reminds me of the Old Man."

Lee's chest tightens, but not from the resemblance he can't quite see. "I wish he were here." His voice feels tight and rough. "I really wanted him to meet her." After the Raptor had left, Lee'd spent weeks waiting for his father to return, all the while feeling like that eleven year-old boy who used to cross off the days on the calendar in blue marking pen until the Commander's next leave.

"You know he's not coming back, Lee." Kara looks up at him and he doesn't think he's imagining how her eyes look a little wet. He bites his lip and nods, ducks his head so she can't see him cry. He doesn't want to think that his father is dead, not just gone and forever wandering, even if that might be the reality of it. They'll never know.

"I just…" He swallows thickly and looks back up. "He got us here. He fought and he pushed and he made the hard choices. And I hated him for it sometimes, but he got us here." He reaches out and brushes his hand over the fine hairs on the baby's head. "I just wanted him to see his legacy. I want him to know he's not going to be forgotten."

Something in Kara's face changes; her eyes widen and her lips part in a small ' _oh_ ' like she's just figured out the last piece of a puzzle that's been niggling at her. She swallows hard and presses her lips to their daughter's forehead. Her shoulders begin to shake. Lee wraps his arms around them both, holds on tight to everything important he has left.

He hears Kara whisper in a voice not meant for his ears, " _Lords, I get it now_."

 

.end

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Seed Sprouted](https://archiveofourown.org/works/521523) by [ziparumpazoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziparumpazoo/pseuds/ziparumpazoo)




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